The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.
What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.
P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such information about individuals was illegal? (like go to jail illegal, not pay a fine illegal).
By making that illegal, collecting it would not be profitable (and it would put the entity collecting it at risk of legal repercussions). "Loyalty cards", "coupons", "special offers just for you", all gone in an instant. You could still advertise in places like on the subway, or on a billboard, but it would be illegal to collect any information about who saw your ad.
If you're over 50, you probably read a newspaper. And in reading the newspaper might have looked at the weekly ad for the various supermarkets in your neighborhood. That never bothered you because you weren't being "watched". The ad was made "just for you" and it didn't include specials on only the things you like to eat. When read a magazine you saw ads in it for people who like to read about the magazine's subject matter. Magazines would periodically do 'demographic' surveys but you could make that illegal too.
Generally if you're under 40 you've probably grown up with the Internet and have always had things tracking you. You learned early on to be anonymous and separate your persona in one group for the one in another. That people have relentlessly worked to make it impossible to be anonymous angers you to your core and their "reason" was to target you with ads. By maybe that it was "ads" was a side effect? That is probably the most effective way to extract value out of surveillance data but there are others (like extortion and blackmail).
I resonate strongly with the urge to slay the "Advertising Monster" but what I really want to slay is how easily and without consequence people can violate my privacy. I don't believe that if you made advertising illegal but left open the allowance to surveil folks, the surveillance dealers would find another way to extract value out of that data. No, I believe choking off the "data spigot" would not only take away the 'scourge' of targeted advertising, it would have other benefits as well.